


Green Eyed Monster

by beccaelizabeth



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-03-24
Updated: 2004-03-24
Packaged: 2017-10-06 07:52:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/51378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beccaelizabeth/pseuds/beccaelizabeth





	Green Eyed Monster

One of his captors had green eyes.

His world was full of eyes now- electronic eyes staring down from the ceiling, cold eyes looking in through the glass of the door. Boredom or anger from the green coats, clinical detachment from the white. Mostly their eyes looked ugly, dirty, dead. One pair just looked green. It caught his attention, though the soldier boy in question might have wished it didn't. Attention from a chaos mage could lead to anything. When the mage in question was already near terminally bored... anything would be something special.

Outside the glass his captors felt quite safe. Nothing got out. He'd tried. An enchanter needed tools, herbs, potions, and they'd left him with nothing but his own self. His own body, scarred, tattooed and naked. Stuck behind glass, no physical threat. They only watched as he moved around the cell, graceful movements, not quite dancing. They wouldn't recognise the forms- chaos kata, never twice the same. Complex poses, yoga or just a way to pass the time. Old fashioned exercise, even sit ups. Pretty soon he was in the best shape he'd been in his life. They just watched, eyes cold, or green.

They never bothered with questions any more. They had, once. Tried to 'rehabilitate' him, make him over in their image. Tried to break him at first. Old tricks were the best- take away timepieces, keep him from sleeping, don't let him get in any kind of routine. They tried all that, on a child of chaos, while he just smirked, or played along a while and babbled for them crazily. They put drugs in his food but he'd long since learned to ride his altered chemistry. Eventually they tried what would have worked best from the first- repetition, endless, boring, always the same. "Were you involved in the Sunnydale incidents? What did you put in the candy? The spell or formula, the details, please. We can't help you if we don't know what you've done. It's in your own best interests. Tell us what you know and you'll be free to go." Sometimes he gave them an answer, sometimes he didn't. Once they'd been excited, taken his words like they meant something, gone off to work out the alchemy and poetry and strings of dead languages until they had some kind of potion to use. Last time they'd unwrapped one of his gifts like that they'd found a perfectly ordinary laxative. The time before that it was a Sumerian formula for beer. Good beer, but not quite what the government wanted from him. "How did you enchant the costumes? How did you change that civilian into a sub-T?"

Whatever words they wrapped around it, his own good, his country's interests, it always came back to that.

"I know what you want from me." He said conversationally to the air one day, quite sure those eyes on him could listen, check the playback, show someone in control. "Riots on command. Tame little terrors. And I know you know you're not going to get them. What would be in it for me? My freedom? We know better. What you have so far failed to notice is that I am an artist. Teaching you my art interests me not at all. But working it..."

He closed his eyes and waited, and after a while some cold familiar voices did reply.

"Which art would that be?"

"The art of transformation." he replied, looking out past the glass to the white coat that stood there and the green that guarded him. "To take someone and change them, turn them inside out and set them free. What every art form seeks to do, and cannot. Change a man utterly."

"And these changes- they'd be lasting?"

"Permanent. And transient. Depends on how you look at them. Physical change takes a lot of power. It tends to wear off. But emotional- what's done to a man stays with him forever."

"That doesn't sound like something we could use." Said white coat and stepped back as if to walk away.

"So speaks a man of little imagination. What I can conjure up for you is a creature such as could make every red blooded man a craven fool, make every last soldier boy scared that such a thing could be hiding in their bed. I can make a monster of any one of you. Bring out the darkness and let it play. Doesn't that sound like something the military could use?"

It took more words than that of course, but he had them then. After all, what did it cost them? Supplies from a supermarket, incense sticks from a market stall, some silk, some stones, a little silver... and one soldier boy. With green eyes.


End file.
